It's all in the method, Tracy Anderson says

New York Times

Published 3:14 pm, Friday, December 28, 2012

Tracy Anderson, the tiny blond fitness guru perhaps best known as Gwyneth Paltrow's trainer and business partner, is as bright and sparkly as the Swarovski crystal-encrusted iPhone case she was admiring one recent day.

"I love this!" she squealed, bouncing on the sofa of the Greenwich Hotel in New York City. Then she turned the case over and spied a fighting word: Soul, short for SoulCycle, a popular chain of cycling studios in New York and Los Angeles.

She looked as if she had swallowed something sour, and nearly dropped the bejeweled case. Her girlishness disappeared, and she said flatly: "I can get you better legs than them."

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Anderson, 37, claims that SoulCycle, through a former employee of hers, uses one of her inventions: a system of resistance bands that hangs from the ceiling. (A SoulCycle spokeswoman had no comment.)

Anderson described her own philosophy as "the method," and talked passionately about the science behind it, tossing around terms like "proprioception perception," "strength of synapses" and "muscle confusion."

"I move across the large muscles in a way like when you were a kid you got an Indian burn, building collective strength between muscle groups," she explained with a smile. Anderson has not sought certification in fields like exercise physiology or teaching, she said, because, "I am so hard on myself with not deviating the amount of time that I have for research and development of the method."

As for coming up with moves to slim problem areas where women are predisposed to store fat ("disproportionate struggle," in Andersonspeak), she painted a vivid picture.

"I'm completely focused on how can I get forces to travel from opposing directions and end up creating a contraction in a muscle that's going to then pull in," she said. "And then as we lose the fat the muscular structure will be vibrating so well that it will have the connective tissues pull the skin back to it."

Gary Diffee, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who examined some of her claims, said, "The science seems to be a mixture of true, kind of true, true but irrelevant to the point she is trying to make, and wrong."

"The main thing is that she is getting people to move," he said.

Indeed, the testimonials of clients who say that her workouts have transformed their bodies have earned her sobriquets such as "organic plastic surgeon." Her fans chronicle their efforts on message boards and blogs with titles like Teeny Tiny Quest, a nod to the body type Anderson is famous for helping to form.